Digital Arts ::: week 1 notes

This covered five examples of creative people working with musical-visual form in different ways - through moving image, interactive art, performance and gaming.

Autechre
Electronic music duo on Warp Records working with a range of digital formats. Inspired by the abstractions afforded by digital sound editing, and the music technology itself – ‘using the studio as an instrument’. Their work uses analogue sound synthesis, Digital Sound Processing (DSP) and generative processes. A mutant mix of analogue and digital systems controlled or manipulated by a wide range of software are used to feed an experimental process of sound construction and deconstruction.

ref: article on Ae with some good screenshots of their custom sound software

Alex Rutterford
British director and graphic designer working with music video that typically features synaesthetic computer generated imagery. He has worked with Amon Tobin, Autechre and Radiohead. Rutterford is interested in both commissions and producing independent films or interactive installations that experiment with motion graphics and abstract space.

ref: interview on the making of Gantz Graf and future plans

Golan Levin
Programmer, artist and composer interested in developing interactive works that use generative systems to create synaesthetic media in realtime. These systems often use gestures or other forms of embodied interaction to influence generative image and sound processes. As he writes his own software we can view this as an integral part of his creative process – developing and expressing his ideas through the act of writing code. Levin often collaborates on creative projects in different capacities – as artist, composer or programmer.

ref: artist website

Toshio Iwai
Iwai is a Japanese media artist originally inspired by proto-cinematic devices such as phenakistiscopes and zoetropes. His work includes interactive installations, television, museum design and video games, and explores the relationship between sound and image. His interactive works combine elements of chance and generative music to create musical-visual form. Most recently, this interest has extended to electronic musical instrument design in the Tenori-on developed in collaboration with Yamaha.

ref: historical overview of Iwai

Blast Theory
Artist group working across performance, games and interactive media particularly Location Based Gaming. They often collaborate with research centres, such as the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. Their games explore the connections made possible by mobile phones and other handheld electronic devices between online environments and urban streetscapes. The main focus of these experiences is the human interaction that occurs in these new kinds of social space and dramatic narrative that is generated by playing the game.

ref: artist website